I was thinking the same thing. Looking at this, it seems in some ways more primitive and less principled than what they were planning, but on the other hand, this is actually being shipped. Power-Fx seems to separate out the relational data from the GUI. But it has relational data and it's reactive so it's most of the way there I suppose.
OoOooOoooh, I need to read up on this. Just found the blog via this pointer, and it's in alignment with some of my thinking... just a bit different.
I believe in the power of good reactive programming as Excel is amazing, and this Power-FX is looking really cool. I'd be concerned about how it fits within the larger engineering world versus the Microsoft universe, but I built a programming language that is reactive from the get-go.